The GOP, “Real Parties,” and Factions

Yuval Levin makes a curious error in his review of the election results:

The voters that could carry Republicans to victory are there, but far too many of them did not vote this time. If we must look at it through racial categories (which the exit polls encourage, alas), it’s certainly true that a significant gain in Hispanic votes (rather than a 3 point decline from McCain’s percentage of the Hispanic vote) would have helped Romney some, but there was no plausible path to increasing it enough to overcome the decline in the white vote (of which Romney won 72%) [bold mine-DL].

I assume that Levin must have just mixed up the numbers here. White voters accounted for 72% of the electorate, and Romney won 59% of them. Had Romney won 72% of the white vote (which is virtually impossible), we wouldn’t be talking about a Republican defeat this week. Levin is right that there was a significant drop-off in white turnout between 2008 and 2012, but he then seems to ignore what this discovery implies. Levin has a common but misleading view of what the Republican Party is:

The Republican Party has its own interest groups too, of course. It has often been too protective of big business, above all. But interest groups of this sort in Republican politics play nothing like the role they have in Democratic politics [bold mine-DL]. The Republican Party, for good and bad, is much more of a real party—largely united and moved (and increasingly so) by a complicated and often contradictory but at bottom very coherent worldview we call conservatism which, to vastly overgeneralize, argues for traditional morality, free enterprise, and a robust national defense.

Like the conceit that movement conservatives are more willing to question their assumptions, this is a flattering view for Republicans and conservatives to have about the GOP, but it gets something important very wrong. Unlike the other major party, Levin says, the GOP is not simply an “incoherent amalgam of interest groups,” but rather a party that “seeks power to advance its own vision of the good of the whole.” This isn’t true. The reason it isn’t true is that a political coalition can seek to serve the interests of its members and still have a vision of the common good or the national interest that it seeks to promote. Everyone involved in politics would like to believe that the political coalition he supports is a “real party” rather than a self-serving faction, just as everyone likes to believe that his views are the moderate and reasonable ones opposed to the “extremism” of others.

What this “real party” talk obscures is the degree to which the GOP fails to serve the interests of many of its constituents and its most likely supporters while masking this failure with a generic appeals to “values” or American exceptionalism. Those appeals don’t really promise Republican voters much of anything specific or concrete, and so the GOP conveniently never has to deliver. If many white working- and middle-class voters stayed away from the polls this year, I suspect it is at least partly because many of them recognized that the GOP, especially one led by someone like Romney, had nothing to offer them.

Tim Carney’s argument for free-market populism is a good starting point for Republicans interested in giving these people a reason to support the GOP again. These appeals will also tend to fall on deaf ears among younger voters. According to the exit poll, Romney trailed among the youngest cohorts of voters: Obama won voters aged 30-44 by seven and voters aged 18-29 by 23 points. One of several reasons that Republican candidates keep faring so poorly with younger voters is that these voters have no confidence that the GOP leadership understands the difference between a “robust national defense” and near-constant agitation for new wars, and they can see that the party’s rhetoric about “free enterprise” is frequently undermined by its deference to the interests of concentrated wealth. Advocating reheated fusionism of the sort that Levin is promoting here isn’t going to get the attention of disaffected voters.

MORE FROM THIS AUTHOR

Hide 7 comments

7 Responses to The GOP, “Real Parties,” and Factions

The Ryan Medicare plan, which Romney adopted in the first debate (if not before), is reasonably seen by people under 55 as ‘socialism for me, but not for thee.’ If vouchercare is ok for anyone, it should be applied to everyone. It’s very good politics to exempt people over 55 from your austerity measures. Unless you are hoping for votes from people under 45.

This is true, but try having that conversation with someone over 65 and see where you get. Many of the very same seniors who demand strong defense, want to abolish “welfare’, i.e. government assistance for poor urban dwellers, will tell you how medicare is “their” money, because they “paid into it”. Yet they are completely oblivious to the fact that they will exceed what they “paid into it” well before they stop using it.

In fact almost %40 of these same people do not even acknowledge that Medicare is a government program, and that it is basically socialized Medicine. Yet, they are the ones demanding the repeal of the “government take-over of healthcare”, aka the piece of pork-pie Obama gave to the Health Insurance industry know as Obamacare. Thus, both sides try to pander to the older folks and want to draw the line at 55, because historically those are the people who voted the most.

Maybe if the youth vote continues to grow, there will be a real opportunity for a real public debate on what to do with the fiscal time bomb know as Medicare.

The 2010 CIRCLE study, listed the top four issues for young voters as economy, health care, Afghanistan, illegal immigration.

In 2010, Rock The Vote found it was 1) Jobs and the economy, 2) education and the cost of college, 3) budget deficit, 4) healthcare, 5) Afghanistan, 6) immigration.

Real conservatives can address unemployment, the college rip off cost bubble, competing with illegal aliens for jobs, The Social Security Ponzi Scheme, the cost of blood and treasure playing global cop.

Bob Jones, you are right. My parents are convinced that they have paid into the system all along and are now getting their money back. They don’t get that they supported their own parents, and now a dwindling revenue base is supporting them. There is not a lot I can say to comfort them. It is like explaining a pyramid scheme to late arrivals.

Clint, I spend a lot of time around twenty-somethings (as a parent and as a former coach) and I believe those studies nail it closely although in my experience health care is a bigger concern than the deficit. Typically they can afford health care or rent, but not both. Guess which they choose? And they have to borrow tuition or not go to school.

It is hard to convince them that conservatism has answers but that is because conservatism is drowned out by/perceived as the GOP. I point them this way when I can, but they are skeptical. The conflation is too strong in their minds.

Re: Yet they are completely oblivious to the fact that they will exceed what they “paid into it” well before they stop using it.

If you class Medicare as insurance that’s not a case of moral turpitude. I had my first car totaled after just two months– and I got far more back from my auto policy than I had paid into it. I don’t think I was a dreaded “taker” because of that.

I think a big part of whats wrong with the GOP is that the party tries to make voters reflect the party, when the party should reflect the voters. I am not suggesting that political parties should not have values. Rather, I suggest that the GOP should prioritize what values matter most to its voters, and build itself around the most universally shared priorities. It should get away from hot button issues that are rarely about as much about values as they are about divisive over attachment to ones prefered expression of a value, when they are not just simple moral masturbation. Most importantly, it needs to do this by allowing diverse people to find common ground through a healthy political process.

The GOP is too mired in the politics of ready made identity and exclusion through pontification for any overly defined future party structure or strategy to lead to anything other but more closed minded hostility. The specifics might change, but the attitude will remain the same. Never ending dealogical purity test mean less and less people pass muster, and it also means less and less voters. Its not just ethic diversity or a tweaked idea or two the GOP needs, its a diversity of ideas.

This is a fluff job. The GOP lost because they disenfranchised some 10 to 20 MILLION voters when they cheated Ron Paul. If they had played by their own delegate selection rules, and ran the RNC as a nominee selection process rather than a coronation, Ron Paul would have won the nomination, and won the election by a LANDSLIDE!!! But no, they had to lie, cheat, and steal to get Romney nominated. And in the process alienated and disenfranchised Republicans, Independents, and DEMOCRATS who would have flocked to Dr. Paul’s common sense approach to politics and policy!